“Never Forget That They Were All Wrong” Ctd

My support was more hesitant than Sullivan’s, and I recall having many doubts. But having served as a mid-level official in the Defence Department through the ‘major combat operations’ phase of the war (that is, before the real Iraq war kicked off), I also recall giving a farewell speech to colleagues before moving to DFAT and saying that we had done the right thing.

I was wrong for a lot of reasons — strategic, political, humanitarian — but the most important is that the Iraq War did not meet the basic test of a just war, which allows for pre-emptive military action against an imminent threat, but not preventive war designed to stop such imminent threats from even emerging. The Iraq War, to my mind, was clearly a preventive war and thus constituted a crime of aggression.

I don’t suppose my support for the war mattered very much at the time, and although I now have a public forum to air my revised views, I doubt my change of heart matters much more now. I mention all of this only to encourage others to talk about their views of the Iraq War ten years after the invasion, and to tell readers what they continue to believe and what they have changed their minds about.